Amsterdam is not an easy to city to walk around. First, the canals line most of the streets so as long as you are walking north and south it is not a problem. Traveling east or west means finding a bridge and so it takes a bit longer. In addition, Amsterdam also uses the bike lane system, so you need always be aware of bikes passing and to make sure you don’t accidentally step in front of one.
However, walking the city provides for some beautiful sights. I took so many pictures of the canals and the narrow houses lining the streets, and occasionally we’d discover some ancient gothic church or very modern design studio that really stood out.
We started our sightseeing tour by walking all the way to the south, towards the museum district and flower market. We didn’t have any plans to enter any museums but just to walk around the area. The first museum you see when you arrive is the Rijksmuseum which straddles a bike lane and pedestrian path. It is a very large building, housing various works including quite a bit of Rembrandt. Beyond that is the Van Gogh museum, and other smaller museums nestled among gardens and parks. The garden behind the Rjiksmuseum is especially creepy – there were little pillars with bronzed body parts, giant spiders, and creepy stainless steel beehives hanging from trees. Don’t visit at night! We also made an early visit to the flower market which was only just starting to open. The tulip season is over by summertime, but somehow they dug up some flowers to sell to the tourists. I was surprised to see they were even selling marijuana seed kits to take home.
At one point we were heading north to see a particular church – and we had to cross a busy street. There was construction going on nearby, and a big truck was blocking the crosswalk so you had to peek around the truck to see whether the light was green or red. We peeked around, saw green, and started to cross, but less than two seconds later the light changed to red. The crossing lights in Amsterdam don’t blink a warning – they just instantly change to red. Lesson learned but at the wrong time – Kuniko was a little ahead of me and caught flat footed in the middle lane as a big dumptruck revved up its engine and turned into the street aiming right for us. I’ll never forget Kuniko’s reaction – she froze, kind of crouched, and threw her hands out in both directions as if saying “Which direction should I go?” Luckily the driver stopped his truck and allowed us to live – but we learned a hard lesson about crossing the street in Amsterdam.
Since we survived a near-death experience we decided to go celebrate life by eating breakfast. We found a little caf̩ that had outdoor seating on a busy intersection, and we sat outside sipping our coffees. Each coffee was served with a little miniature stroopwaffel (two thin waffles sandwiching a layer of caramel syrup Рapparently a famous product of the Netherlands). I ordered some eggs and avocado on toast, and Kuniko had a big omelet, and we chewed our food happily, watched people walking by on the way to work, and considered the fragility of life.
It was getting close to check out time back at our tiny hotel, so we made the trek back to the room, packed up and checked out at the little bar counter in the lobby. It was a ten minute walk or so to our next hotel – the Inntel Hotel – which we’d use for the last three nights remaining in our summer trip. Fortunately the hotel was a really nice one, and our room was quite large. This was a nice upgrade to the rooms we’d stayed in so far, and a nice way to end the trip.
After settling in we left to go out and find some lunch. I had read online about a food hall (called FoodHallen) and it was also recommended by a friend who had visited Amsterdam the previous week for the Pride festival. We walked across town to find it, and it turned out to be pretty nice. We’d seen a similar food hall in Prague during previous trips, and apparently it is a popular trend. The fall was filled with small restaurants, serving international foods. When we visit a new city we try to focus on local foods – so most of the foods in the food hall were a little different from what we wanted to eat. It felt strange to go to the Netherlands and eat Mexican food, pizza, or sushi. There was one stand featuring bitterballen with different kinds of filling. We ordered some with meat filling, and some with truffle cream. Also we had some truffle mayo on the side, just in case we weren’t getting enough truffle in our diet. Together with two local beers they went down nicely.
After this very light lunch we got the bright idea to go cheese tasting. There are a ton of cheese shops around the city – mainly branches of Old Amsterdam, Henri Willig, and then some generic cheese companies selling various brands of cheese. We started at Old Amsterdam, and at each store they had samples of cheese out in front of the wedges they were selling. Right away we noticed that the cheeses they were selling were about triple the price of the same cheese we had found the previous night at the local supermarket, so we were there just for tasting. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of education in the shops. I wanted to learn more about what makes their particular cheese products special. The staff I talked to were a little grouchy and I think they were shell-shocked from dealing with so many tourists all day. Still, it was fun to try to varieties of cheese that we hadn’t seen before – Old Amsterdam makes a creamy goat cheese that was tasty.
Nearby we found a Flying Tiger store, but again we couldn’t find Kuniko’s crayfish cocktail napkins. I really blew it in Reykjavik, didn’t I? As we left Flying Tiger a sudden rainstorm came through. We were dealing with these storms the whole time we were in the Netherlands. The rain would come, stay for 5-10 minutes, and then disappear and we’d get sun. We decided to wait out the rain sipping red wine at a table with a big umbrella, and it was a nice little break.
At breakfast we had been served coffee with a little mini individually wrapped stroopwaffel, and we thought that it was a perfect size for a souvenir to take back to our students. We shopped around for some to bring back to Japan, but mainly in Amsterdam they sold stroopwaffels in large sizes, about 8 to a pack. We have way too many students and not enough suitcase space to bring back those, so our long search began to find the source of the mini-stroopwaffel.
For dinner that night we found a restaurant serving local food in a little bit of a touristy part of town. Finding local food is surprisingly difficult – there were an inordinate amount of shops run by Middle Easterners selling pizza/doner kebab/steaks/ribs. It was like a template – these restaurants always served the same things at the same prices. But the place we found had a local dish called stamppot (mashed potatoes mixed with sausage and topped with a meatball). I ordered chicken skewers with a satay peanut sauce, and it was delicious and very refreshing. This was the first time we’d eaten chicken in almost two weeks. There is an Indonesian connection in Amsterdam because Indonesia was originally colonized by the Dutch and a fair amount of culture was transferred between them, and I often saw satay dishes on menus. Anyway, that was my rationalization for eating a slightly Asian dish in the Netherlands.
We walked from the restaurant up through the wild district, with clouds of marijuana smoke coming from various “coffeehouses” and went to check out the Waag, an old building that used to serve as the city gate of Amsterdam. Nearby there was a pretty large historic church, surrounded on all sides by the red light district. We found a place with outside dining to have a couple glasses of wine and realized we were surrounded on all sides by buildings that had big windows in the front, and a red light over each one of them. We were there early and most of the windows were dark, but as we left a few windows were occupied with (somewhat scary looking) women wearing only underwear and leering at passersby.
Suddenly we got caught in another flash rainstorm, so we made a dash for the nearest convenience store for supplies, and then went back to our nice big comfortable hotel room to call it a night. 35,000 steps – another big hiking day.
